the post of the guy with the milk has me thinking. has anything written anything at length about how RWers in the west seem to have a lot of hangups relating to childhood? there are a bunch of weird things that they have done/picked up on that seem childish to me, or seem to display an inability to move past childhood:
-the brief milk obsession that seems to rear its head again every now and then (oedipal?)
-the frequent focus on what’s going on in schools and colleges, often in lurid terms: furry hysteria, transphobes often discussing locker rooms/bathrooms
-obsession with gaming, anime, star wars, etc. hobbies/interests that most people pick up as kids
-charlie kirk’s diaper thing a while back, i think crowder has also dressed up as a child/baby in public too?
-doubling down on things instead of confronting them, like going on all-meat diets as a reaction to more people questioning the ethics of animal agriculture, and then doubling down on THAT and going on an all raw meat diet. also the pro-tobacco fringe that seems to be especially popular among red scare, “post left” types
-aversion to sex and sexuality
-“this is what they took from you” captions accompanying images of kids playing N64 or riding bikes, nostalgia more broadly
-“trad” stuff presenting essentially a dollhouse version of motherhood
idk if there’s anything there but it seems like enough that someone could write an interesting essay about it. tie it into alienation and the nuclear family/suburbanization and the end of the american dream maybe. like all these people want to live life like a 1950s burger ad, the only time in their life where they’ve felt close to that was in childhood, and now as adults they see that the whole one-income, two kids in the suburb thing isn’t possible anymore so they just retreat into memories of childhood (consciously or not) and get angrier and angrier about it
You must log in or register to comment.
Aversion to sex, obsession with games and comics… half of that describes the nu-left too
I’d like everyone here to know I’m pro-sex for the time being.
Nice
you’re not wrong! i do think that there’s a level of… childishness, i guess? that motivates right wingers at a level it doesn’t seem to affect the left, though. consider how many RWers have gone totally nuts off of the last jedi or game devs not having every female character wear a skimpy outfit, seems like that level of outrage doesn’t exist on the left, at least it doesn’t seem to be as much of a political motivator as it is for online chuds.
Online fascists got mad that anyone dared question social norms (like their obsession with Anita Sarkeesian, my chud sister still whinges about her for some reason), and their shitty Gamergate, and they’ve never let it go.
I’ve found hogs hold onto grudges for seemingly forever, and fear and hate anything related to those grudges. It’s certainly not a healthy way to live.
this is something i’ve noticed with the reactionaries in my life too, just try mentioning jane fonda around a boomer republican
I really wanted to post that emoji, but in all seriousness, this is a really interesting observation. I think in some cases it could be some of them trying to deal with their own fucked up childhoods. And then they impose some other kind of misery on the next generation, while pining for some ideal childhood they never had. Generational abuse / trauma on a minor scale maybe?
A story from just yesterday that made me irrationally angry:
Ultra chud at my workplace, drives a massive $60k+ truck, brings in his Black rifle coffee Co thermos every day. You get the idea… A group of us were talking about shoveling snow and he literally says “I don’t ever need to worry about EVER doing that because I have two sons and I make them do it!” and laughs of course. Probably if someone else had said it, it would have been said with more levity and I could have laughed it off. But with this guy, I could just tell, he wanted to make these kids miserable. They need to learn how to become MEN so they don’t get to have a snow day, they get to shovel for dad!
Another anecdote: dealing with some family issues in regards to my grandfather being shitty to my mother and her siblings. Mom and aunt upset, but dealing with everything with poise and dignity. Uncle, tantrums, anger, drinking, bringing up 50 year old daddy issues. Surprise, surprise, He’s politically the most conservative one in the family…
Feels like mommy and daddy issues all around that get passed on down the line. Gets worse and more twisted and bizarre as material conditions deteriorate and suburban fascism intensifies.
that would make sense, i wonder if there’s been any research done on parenting outcomes for parents who identify as conservative vs those who id as liberal/left. it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the bootstraps parents traumatize their kids at a higher rate - even their cishet, male, conservative kids
A while back someone on here posted a writeup of some study about the parenting styles of Nazi and pre-Nazi Germany and it was all bootstrap shit about leaving crying babies alone so they didn’t “learn they could simply cry for attention.”
It feels like a lot of the online taste makers for the right are coming from 4chan which are mostly elder millennials, so that’s why I could see them pining for the 50’s when their parents were kids and they have nostalgia for shit like the n64. Modern burgerpunk fascism is so goddamned stupid.
i’m not sure how important 4chan is for internet reactionaries anymore. i haven’t gone on the site in a long time but i get the impression that it’s pretty dead compared to where it was heading into the 2016 election. seems like most of the internet weirdos have moved onto Musk’s twitter
I love juiiiiice!
You could say the same about anyone born in the 80s or later. Libs are obsessed with Harry Potter and other YA vomit, Disney adults, etc. I think the major factors are exponentially increased alienation/atomization (with better access to subcultures thanks to the internet) and that many people are stuck renting forever and barely scraping by. So many people are unable to have a stable home life because they can’t just buy a house/condo/apt and settle down somewhere. Couple that with the death of the career job and people are forced to constantly move house and grind to find better jobs so the level of anxiety and despair is at an all-time high. This leads to severe mental health issues and I think increasingly alarming levels of escapism is one of the outcomes.
that’s true, there’s definitely a mirror image to a lot of what i’ve written above. i think you can combine what you’ve written with the general fears of the future - climate change, political instability domestically and abroad, demographic changes for chuds, and so on weigh on the minds of even the people who are doing relatively well - and it’s no wonder that people across the political spectrum retreat into nostalgia.
You could say the same about
anyone born in the 80s or lateranyone currently living. The boomers all want to go back to 1950.
Does anyone not have arrested development these days?
the pro-tobacco fringe that seems to be especially popular among red scare, “post left” types
ugh is it really
When you’ve been locked out of all the signifiers of adulthood by the previous generations it’s more that we weren’t allowed to become adults
Amber.
really interesting article, thanks for sharing
Also 4chan’s explicit baby-talking “fren” posts and cheems stuff
Hey, that’s the name of this show!
I think it’s the Chud version of a pretty universal thing. If you’re younger than Gen x you were probably locked out of the financial capacity to obtain the signifiers of adulthood like a house and stuff. So what extra money you have isn’t much more than your spending capacity you had as a teenager, so your choices in treats are pretty limited to the same stuff you grew up with, this is also now a huge market so it’s being fed and advertised. Also everything has gotten sooooo much worse
